Photo credits: Epix
In Billy the Kid shows screenwriter Michael Hirst (The Tudors; Vikings) how the gunfighter (Jonah Collier plays the young Billy; Tom Blyth the slightly older) from the title loses his innocence at an early age. When Billy’s mother Kathleen (Eileen O’Higgins) begs the banker for a loan while visiting a Kansas bank, her son picks up a pen. It is a scene that symbolizes the impotence that the would-be exile is confronted with in the America of the frontier. The first two episodes of Billy the Kid are all about the hardships endured by the impoverished Kathleen and her family.
The story takes place between about 1870 and 1880. First there is a move from Ireland to the American east coast. Then the Irish travel to Kansas. And in the second episode you can see how Billy ends up in Santa Fe, in the American state of New Mexico. There are always people who want to abuse Kathleen and Billy. For example, there is a coachman who wants to rape Kathleen and Billy’s mother eventually marries an evil good-for-nothing. At a young age, Billy also sees three Mexicans being hanged, clearly a traumatic event.
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What do you do in such a cruel world? Then you will play for yourself. So it’s not long before Billy comes to get what he thinks he’s entitled to, with a gun on his hip. He wants to assert himself in an area where the law of the strongest applies. Hirst cleverly shows this transition, in which you as a viewer remain sympathetic to the anti-hero. It is also painful that this is where the foundations are laid for the literally cut-throat competition (how capitalism emaciates the people at the bottom of the ladder) that continues to this day in the United States. But that is inherent to a good Western: it also says something about the times of today.
